Introduction

In today’s continuously growing technology sector and ever-changing competitive world, the Internet is becoming an essential part of our day-to-day lives. Before making any important decision, we prefer to search for some relevant information on the internet to stay on the safer side. So website hosting is not an option but it is a necessity for businesses. It allows you to connect with the market and stay ahead of the competition.

Simply owning a website is not enough. An organization needs to build a website that is user-friendly, informative, and accessible. To create a fully-functional website having all these qualities, the website must be thoroughly tested. Some of you might be wondering about the types of website testing to choose for your project depending on the unique business requirements. Automation testing and manual testing are the two types of testing techniques for your software development process that you can choose accordingly. 

Testing is the last and most important stage of the software development lifecycle. It plays a vital role in building successful and qualitative software. After completing the testing phase, the customer is provided with a ready-to-use project without any errors, with reliability, readability, and convenience. There are some basic rules for website testing that show the user how logical the project is and how easy it is to find all the required information. 

If your website is complex, it takes more time in testing and debugging. According to your project needs, more than 40% of the total budget and resources can be allocated to test a site. For proper and organized website testing, a specially created methodology is provided. Depending on this method, the verification of your site is performed. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss the website testing process in detail. So without any further ado, let’s get started!

What is Website Testing?

Website Testing is the process of checking your web application for possible bugs before it is accessible to the general public. Web Testing explores usability, functionality, reliability, compatibility, security, and web application performance. 

In short, it is a software practice used to ensure the quality of the website by performing various testing methods intended as per the requirements. Performing testing for your site allows you to find bugs before a release, or on a day-to-day basis.

How to Test a Website?

1. Documentation Testing

First thing first, start to test the documentation. When the tester examines the received documentation for the further testing process, they first analyze the site functionality and check the final layouts then proceed. Some of the main artifacts related to website testing are the Traceability matrix, test cases, test plan, and requirements. 

2. Functionality Testing

Functionality Testing is a process that includes various testing parameters like security testing, server testing, user interface, basic website functionalities, APIs, client testing, and database testing. Users can perform both manual testing as well as automation testing to test the functionalities of the website. 

Here are some Web-based Testing operations that include:

Test each web link of your website whether it is working correctly or not and ensure there are no broken links. The link checking process includes MailTo links, outgoing links, anchor links, and internal links.

If Test Forms are working as expected, it will include the following-

• Check form scripts whether it is working as expected or not. For instance, if a user fills the required field in the form, an error message is shown. 
• Verify default values
• After submission, it checks whether the data is linked to a working address or not. 
• Optimize the form for better readability

Test Cookies are running as required. Using these files you can track the actions performed by the active user, so you’re not required to log in again and again when a user enters the site. Testing a cookie includes: 

• These cookie sessions are automatically deleted when expired. 
• Eliminate cookies and test login credentials are required when you visit the site again.

HTML and CSS testing are required to make sure that search engines can crawl your site efficiently which includes: 

• Check Syntax errors 
• Simple Color Schemes
• Check Standard Compliance to make sure that it follows W3C, WA-I, OASIS, ISO, ECMA, or IETF. 

Test business workflow that includes:

• Testing your business scenarios through a series of web pages.
• Test negative scenarios when a user performs an unexpected step, in your web application.

3. Usability Testing

The purpose of usability testing is to analyze your web page by testing that with users. By doing this, you can easily define the ability of the user to learn to operate and evaluate the outputs of your site.

Navigation testing provides: 

• You can easily understand the web pages and access them without any interruption
• You can use Buttons, shapes, and fields of your site very easily
• You can access the entire menu from all pages

Content testing includes:

• Proper spelling and grammar
• Images are placed according to their sizes
• All the instructions are clear and provide correct information
• Content is structured, optimized, and logically linked

Usability testing includes:

• Create a testing strategy to make sure that all the functions of your website can be examined including navigation and content.
• Recruit test participant
• Run the test
• Analyze the results
• Improve your application accordingly

4. Interface Testing

Interface testing is used to make sure that all the interactions between the application server interface and web server are running efficiently including checking the communication processes and verifying whether the error messages are displayed precisely or not. Apart from this, tests intrusions by the user and server are managed here.

In Interface testing, three areas are tested namely Application, Web, and Database Server that includes:

In the application phase, it checks whether the tests are correctly sent to the database or not, and if they find any errors then it must be displayed to the admin rather than the end-user. In the second phase, the web server handles multiple application requests without any restrictions in the services. And lastly, the database server makes sure that the queries give the desired output. 

Test system interacts with you and provides the solutions when the connection between the end-user and system cannot be established and a message is shown to them. 

Some affirmations for website Interface testing is shown here:

• Test the website with various screen resolutions
• Tablets and smartphones are the GUI on target devices while testing a website
• Acquiescence with the standards of graphical interfaces
• Testing the translation accuracy 
• Examine the length of names of interface elements
• Evaluate the website layout, buttons, icons, captions, colors, labels, fonts, font sizes, labels, text formatting, links, and much more.

5. Database Testing

There are many important components required to test a website and one of them is the database. So it must be well tested. These testing activities include: 

• Test the site and check whether there are any errors while running queries
• Maintain Data Integrity
• Update, delete and design the data in the database
• Check queries’ response time and adjust them accordingly.  
• Test data recovered from your database.

6. Compatibility Testing

Compatibility tests make sure that the website you created, displays correctly on various devices or not. It also includes: 

Browser Compatibility Test: As we all know that the same website displays differently on various browsers. So it is important to check whether it works accurately across browsers or generates any errors. Despite this, check for Mobile Browser Compatibility also.

• Text fields, fonts, buttons, etc are called the rendering elements of the website that changes with a change in the OS. So make sure to check the website compatibility across various platforms such as Windows, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Linux, Safari, Mac, etc. 
• Performing database testing is also essential as make sure that your website database works correctly or not in various configurations such as MSSQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, etc. 
• Lastly, you should also consider printing compatibility in your website plan as it verifies the page alignment, fonts, and page graphics of the website.

Despite this, we can say that compatibility testing takes place to test your website with each one of the supported hardware and software configurations such as database, OS, and browser configuration.

7. Performance Testing

While implementing performance testing in your website testing process, helps you to determine the performance of a system, how it actually works in terms of stability under certain conditions. Sites must have the ability to work under high loads which cannot be limited to:

• Test your website if a crash occurs due to peak load then how can it be resolved from such a situation
• Test your website performance when multiple users are logging in to it at the same time
• Website application acknowledgment differs depending on the connection speeds
• Stress-test your website to find out its breakpoint and check how much load it can handle at a time
• Stability Testing has the ability to work just above the acceptable period
• Make sure you’re implementing various optimizations strategies to reduce load times such as server-side cache and gzip compression
• Check how your website works under high peak loads

8. Security Testing

Security Testing is important for an online store that contains sensitive information regarding the customer such as credit card details, passwords, address, etc, so make sure that all your data is protected and maintained functionality as required. Testing Activities includes-

• Unauthorized access to your site is restricted
• Restricted files cannot be downloaded with unauthorized access, it must have valid authorized access to the site
• Check whether the auto-generated captcha is displayed correctly or not
• While using SSL certificates, the website redirects to the encrypted SSL pages
• Make sure to test SSL security features
• Check sessions automatically expire after the user gets inactive

9. Crowd Testing

You will select numerous people to execute tests that can be executed by a selected team member in the company. Crowd-based website testing is a great concept that helps to resolve any overlooked defects.

10. Beta Testing

Beta testing is the final stage of website testing done by the end-users and out-staff people. It basically substitutes your website in the hands of real users to identify the weak points from the user’s point of view as your final version of the application. 

For beta testing, there are several widely used tools by testers such as TestFlight, HockeyApp, and Ubertesters that are used across the world. 

Final Thoughts

These are 10 phases of website testing. If you follow these steps before the end-users access, it should go a long way in determining the errors and bugs and allow you to resolve them before it’s too late.

Many development teams prefer using Bug tracking and Usersnap to capture errors easily and annotate them on-screen. Metadata is automatically entered into the ticket which saves a lot of time and makes sure to enhance developer productivity. It is widely used by startups, as well as giant companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.

We hope you find this article useful and understand various web application testing strategies. Next time when you’re planning to write a test plan, make sure it is important to validate all the aspects beyond the functionality of the website. By this, we conclude the post. It includes almost all testing types that can be implemented depending on your web application.